Do you remember the Jane Austen Knits Summer Pelisse? Well, I ran out of yarn.

I knew I would, but I still waited until the very last stitch to admit that I had to buy another ball.

Finally, it arrived by post, and I was able to finish off the last few rows on the sleeves.

I'm really pleased with this Summer Pelisse pattern! I've finished the left and right fronts, and the back. I cast on for the sleeves last night, but I'm about to run out of yarn so I think a trip up to the yarn shop is in order! The perfect Saturday morning treat, methinks. I'd like to think that Jane would agree, too.

The Summer Pelisse is coming along nicely - I've knitted the right front, and I'm almost done with the back. Next up: cast off the back and knit the right front before moving onto sleeves.

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the first publication of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. It only follows that this year should be all-things Jane Austen-y. Even knitting.

It has been a bit of a glum week. The rain has been pouring down, paperwork has been forming itself into giant piles and deadlines are looming ever-closer. 

I know, I know. I've been awfully quiet.

And it's not just you, I promise: it's work. It really is. I've been working double-shifts every day to try and finish things up for demanding clients and other whatnots. So you see, I really can't upload a blog post every day and meet my deadlines, can I?

It won't happen again. Nosiree.

In the meantime, let me tell you about Ms Austen. You've met her before on this blog over here, here and even here. I can't say I've ever been a Janeite, but I also swore I'd never get married or own anything pink. My, how times have changed. As I write this, I glance over at my mantelpiece which is proudly displaying our favourite wedding photo, a trio of rose-painted pink candles, and a delicate ceramic rose tea set. It just happened like that, It wasn't planned. I'm sure of it.



But I digress. Jane and I have had a love-like relationship, ending more on a love note in recent years. It's true, I own some of the BBC film adaptations, I've read the books, and I've even gone as far as to surreptitiously add Lost in Jane and Bride and Prejudice to our DVD collection. So, when we happened upon Bath in an excursion years ago, we had to visit the lovely Jane Austen Centre with its lovely little shop, Jane Austen museum and paraphernalia - and, of course, the tea rooms. Oh, the tea rooms.



How quaint!

I recently got in touch with the lovely Becca at the Jane Austen Centre and offered her one of my little drawings and whatnots I gathered up into a watercolour sketch for Valentine's Day. Oh, that reads badly - I mean, I drew her something and gifted it to her on Valentine's Day. Much better.















And here you are, copied directly from the email newsletter that now proudly bears a secretive Ms Lydia Bennett on email communications. Ta-da! I felt that Lydia is the most suited companion for social media enterprises; indeed, she would adore the opportunity to follow people on Twitter, and view their images on Facebook. A social visionary before her time, perhaps.


















Lydia was soon accompanied by a Mister Fitzwilliam Darcy. Here he is in his first draft format. I think he could look a bit older, and possibly less smirky. The next draft will see him posing side-on to face Ms Lydia. I'll keep you updated as we progress through the various novels.

And there you have it - you see - I haven't been ignoring you at all. I've been dreaming up watercolours and filling my free moments with Fitzwilliams. It's not all bad. Double-shifts are coming to an end this week and to celebrate my emancipation and other recent merits (more soon!), my very own Mr Darcy has arranged a weekend away in Ye Olde Prague where he proposed. We're saying goodbye to the difficult weeks that have just gone past, and hello to the river banks where we got engaged.

So, ta ta for now. I'll be back on Monday with many photographs and witterings for you lovely folk. Plus, there is much baking and knittery to catch up on! I've got a stack of projects piling up, it's all excitement-a-go at Bakercourt.

Also, before I go, our oh-so-nice WI ladies (including Yours Truly) will be at the International Women's Fair at Spitalfields Market next Saturday the 10th of March from 10am until 5pm. Do pop by and have a cupcake x

Emma, my mother's other daughter, turned three last week. She's my half-sister; we're 23 years apart.



And, as no three-year-old's party is complete without the essential baked goods, we got stuck into the kitchen! Cue: a giant two-layered moist chocolate cake covered in buttercream.

















The problem with a cake like this is that it simply does not appeal to small children. If I were making it for adults I'd finish it off with white chocolate shaving rolls or chopped up chocolate whispers, but this is no ordinary cake: it's for a three-year old.

















You need Astros and edible glitter and icing and marshmallows. Astros, by the way UK, are the most amazing things ever! They're tiny little biscuit balls covered in chocolate and coated in candy. We stuck them into the cake around the outside to make it a bit more colourful and appealing.

















This is the top-view of the cake. That's Barney, by the way. It took us a really long time to make this cake and I was completely relieved when Emma screeched with delight, pointed and said, 'Narney!'. Job done.

















There were mini cupcakes too, of course, decorated with edible pearl glimmer balls, smarties, and edible stars. We baked them in edible cases (like ice-cream cones) and iced them with plain purple and yellow buttercream frosting.

















Isn't it festive? This year we had the party at Scallywags - a play place in Claremont filled with children's play things and a nice, big seating area for the parents too. It meant that we simply arrived with our things, set up, and let the staff serve coffee, tea and cakes and clean up afterwards too.

















This area is more for the smaller children, but, behind me is a jumping castle, a giant 'doll house' for the girls and a play castle for the boys. There are also heaps of dress-up things and the kids can help themselves (creating a lot of mess that you don't have to clean up).
















There was a lot of dressing up and running and playing and balloons and laughing. All good things. That's Emma on the left in purple with the butterfly face-painting. I'll show you a close-up soon. The face-painting wasn't great - a bit wonky and in all the wrong colours, but the children loved the novelty!



... and any party where two Spidermans (they can't possibly be Spidermen because there is only one Spiderman, you see), a dragon and a geisha get together and ride on a smiling giant bug - well, it's bound to be magical, isn't it?



Here's Emma again, looking extra cute and hard at play dressing up like a butterfly/geisha/birthday girl. It's tough being three.



The adults also had their own treats set aside in the chic little 'coffee shop' section of the play place where parents can sit down and have a latte while their kids become princesses and dragons and fire-fighters. I don't particularly enjoy scones (gasp, horror, I'm fully aware of what I'm saying!) but there were some anyway, purchased from the Scallywags bakery.



Yesterday I wrote about my wedding-dress-making-expert-baking-aunt Robyn. She baked this beeyootiful carrot cake that features all sorts of interesting bits and pieces inside including nuts and Turkish apricots. The icing is a sort of cream cheese frosting flavoured with a hint of lemon. It's delicious. I'm going to ask extra nicely if I can  have the recipe before I go back to my kitchen in London.

















The adults were also invited to eat from the children's table, if they liked, where they could eat crisps (Simba Twistees are amazing), cupcakes, small sweets, orange quarters and vienna cubes with rosa tomatoes.

















Needless to say it all went down very well! Emma was delighted with her Barney party, her cake, her friends and her purple balloon. The jumping castle was fantastic and the dress-up items were great too.

It makes me wonder - when do we stop having parties like these? Is it because our role models change? Our interests? Our friends? What if I want a Jane Austen themed party next year, with a Jane cake, bonnets and writing desks? Do they even make Jane Austen themed jumping castles?

My dear friend Lauriane has very kindly informed me of the existence of the hilarious and must-have Jane Austen action figure:

We're on the right path! Now, what would a Jane Austen cake look like?

It's a great shame of mine that I've only read two of Ms Austen's novels - Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park. So, faced with an ebook reader and so many free ebooks (courtesy of the amazing Project Gutenberg), I found myself diving headlong into Hartfield with Emma.

You can't help but be caught up in the way her characters speak and think; it carries over to your day-to-day conversations, it pulls you in and suddenly - oh so suddenly - it is so very easy to be suddenly finding yourself gasp with horror at Harriet Smith's newest quest, or raise an eyebrow at Frank Churchill's dubious behaviour. And the piano, oh! The piano. Who didn't see that coming?

As this was my first foray into ebook territory, I was denied the pleasure of looking at the cover of the book every time I opened my bag. True, my iPad's new cover is very appealing, but it certainly doesn't hold a light to Regency artworks, neatly-set typeface, and brilliant colours. That being as it is, I've decided to select my own cover from the very many that exist in the Emma collections.





















Yes, I'm quite aware that it's an audio book, but, since we're ignoring that this isn't the version I actually read, I think the discrepancy is allowed. Besides, I rather like this version of Emma, she fits all of my expectations. She's beautiful and well-dressed, young but still rather thoughtful.

The plot was less complex than I had anticipated but it didn't leave me wanting. It is easy to read, easy to follow, engaging enough to make you think of it when you're not reading it yet casual enough for it to not demand every spare moment. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Emma annoyed me terribly when I first began reading the novel, but I soon found her far more entertaining and enthralling than her female contemporaries and it all turned out rather well - by about half-way through the novel I was interested in reading more from her to see how her thoughts and opinions progressed. Knightley,  on whom the irony of his leading male role and name are not lost, is a bit of a drip, but he turns out rather well too. Of course he'll never be a Mr Darcy, but how do you better someone who has a six-hour BBC drama dedicated to his story? Robert Martin was a rather predictable plot element, and I liked how Emma/Austen adapted her prose to reflect the change in her character's insights.

I'm not going to warble about Emma and her Knight(ley) but I thought I might digress briefly to think about Bath (in Emma's case, Highbury, which I think to Ms Austen looks rather the same).

















She conjures up the most amazing dwellings in her writing, and indeed this may very well be a fascinating area of research - buildings that rather come alive as you read them into existence. The estates, cottages, streets, priories - they all seem so very real, described down to the most minor details, outfitted with artworks, chairs in every corner, round tables (chosen by Emma herself) and other furnishings. Perhaps my favourite part of visiting Bath (aside from being a tourist with my mother and aunt, of course) was finally seeing the bustling streets where Jane walked, where she wrote, where she socialised...

















And, of course, the tea. We enjoyed a delicious afternoon tea at the Regency Tea Rooms where we all enjoyed Lady Catherine's Proper Cream Tea and where the pleasure of 'taking tea' really comes to light. You sit around a table sipping your preference of delightfully aromatic tea, politely eating scones with jam and clotted cream, and you have to talk. You must, because that is what you have come to the tea rooms (or in Emma's case, to her neighbour's home) to do. It's really very pleasant.


You could imagine Emma, in her afternoon leisure, sitting at a small table like this with Mr Woodhouse, being served tea and scones (with very little jam, he'd say). Even the staff are dressed to period with their pinnies and caps.

















I daresay even Graeme enjoyed a bit of Regency delights! I rather like the way that Jane, on the far wall, overlooks the tea rooms as we all step into her world for a few moments.

The ebook experience could have gone either way; I feel I need to pace myself through Jane Austen's collection (there are, after all, very few novels to work through) but it was a wise choice to start off my ebook experience with something that was going to be so predictably enjoyable and reassuring. The British Library Treasures App I mentioned in a previous post certainly heightened the experience as well, creating a more tangible reading experience (though paradoxically considerably less tangible, hidden beneath the gloss of the iPad screen!) with photographs, manuscript extracts and tidbits of Janeite history. The ebook certainly won't replace the real book - iPads don't smell nearly as nice - but they're convenient with their compact size and ability to make digital scans of your favourite extracts at the press of a button. Plus, as an added bonus for the ebook team, almost all the books I want to read are already out of copyright so Project Gutenberg provides them all readily and for free. Not yet an ebook convert, but I can appreciate the merits.

The only foreseeable ebook downside for me is that it's oh-so-easy to carry around many books at once (my current ebook library is sitting comfortably at 45) and with that comes the temptation to open up a new book at a new chapter at any given time. The temptation to read isn't so bad; it's the fact that the characters end up meeting each other in my thoughts if I don't give them time to settle down. In fact, Emma very recently met with Viy from Gogol's short stories - 'Viy', Gogol writes, 'is a colossal creation of folk imagination. The name is applied by people in Little Russia to the chief of the gnomes, whose eyelids reach to the ground.' I think they were a bit confused, but got along amiably after a spot of tea.